Leonardo Art/Science Evening Rendezvous of 11 April 2019

The LASERs are a national program of evening gatherings that bring artists and scientists together for informal presentations and conversation with an audience. See the program for the whole series.
The event is free and open to everybody.
Email me if you want to be added to the mailing list for the LASERs.
Like previous evenings,
the agenda includes some presentations of art/science projects,
news from the audience, and time for casual socializing/networking.
Where: Stanford University, LiKaShing building - Room LK120
There should be ample parking in the structure on corner of Campus Drive West and Roth Way. (Stanford map)
Parking is mostly free at Stanford after 6pm.
Program (the order of the speakers might change):

7:50-8:10: BREAK. Before or after the break, anyone in the audience currently working within the intersections of art and science will have 30 seconds to share their work. Please present your work as a teaser so that those who are interested can seek you out during social time following the event.

9:00pm-9:30pm: Discussions, networking
You can mingle with the speakers and the audience

Watch it live on your mobile device by using
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Watch it live on your personal computer by using
https://twitter.com/lasertalks
https://www.periscope.tv/lasertalks
See also...

Helen Bronte-Stewart is John E. Cahill Family Professor, Professor of Neurology and, by courtesy, of Neurosurgery at the Stanford University Medical Center. She is also Director of the Stanford Movement Disorders Center, Division Chief of the Movement Disorders division, and co-director of the Stanford Balance Center. Her expertise in single neuronal electrophysiology in primates has been transferred to the operating room where she performs the intra-operative microelectrode mapping of basal ganglia nuclei during deep brain stimulations (DBS) procedures for the treatment of patients with Movement Disorders. Her research focus is on elucidating the mechanisms of abnormal brain activity that contribute to abnormal movement and balance disorders in Parkinson's disease, tremor and dystonia. She has developed new technology to measure human motor control such as a MIDI keyboard, which has been developed by Intel's division of Healthcare Technology. In the Stanford Human Motor Control & Balance laboratory, her team is investigating the effects of interventions such as DBS and/or exercise on specific aspects of balance and upper extremity movement in Parkinson's disease. In the operating room, she and her colleagues record electrical signals directly from the human brain and have demonstrated that DBS suppresses an abnormal rhythm in the brain and may act like a brain pacemaker. Her passion for understanding how the brain controls movement comes from a background in classical and modern dance.

Jay McClelland (Stanford/ Center for Mind, Brain and Computation) is the Lucie Stern Professor at Stanford University, where he was formerly the chair of the Psychology Department. In fall 2006 McClelland moved to Stanford University from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a professor of psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. He also holds a part-time appointment as Consulting Professor at the Neuroscience and Aphasia Research Unit (NARU) within the School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester. In 1986 McClelland published Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition" with David Rumelhart. His present work focuses on learning, memory processes, and psycholinguistics. He is a former chair of the Rumelhart Prize committee, having collaborated with Rumelhart for many years. Awards include: William W. Cumming prize from Columbia University (1970), Research Scientist Career Development Award from the National Institute of Mental Health (1981—86, 1987—97), Rumelhart Prize (2010), and C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize (2014). He has been a Fellow of the National Science Foundation (1970—73). In July 2017, McClelland was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

Piero Scaruffi is a cultural historian who has lectured in three continents and published several books on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, the latest one being "The Nature of Consciousness" (2006). He pioneered Internet applications in the early 1980s and the use of the World-Wide Web for cultural purposes in the mid 1990s. His poetry has been awarded several national prizes in Italy and the USA. His latest book of poems and meditations is "Synthesis" (2009). As a music historian, he has published ten books, the latest ones being "A History of Rock and Dance Music" (2009) and "A History of Jazz Music" (2007). His latest book of history is "A History of Silicon Valley" (2011). The first volume of his free ebook "A Visual History of the Visual Arts" appeared in 2012. His latest book is "Intelligence is not Artificial" (2013). He has also written extensively about cinema and literature. He founded the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) in 2008. Since 2015 he has been commuting between California and China, where several of his books have been translated.

Irving Weissman is a Professor of Pathology and Developmental Biology at Stanford University, where he is the Director of the Stanford Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine along with Michael Longaker. His awards include election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1989, being named California Scientist of the Year in 2002, the Robert Koch Prize in 2008 the Rosenstiel Award in 2009 and the Max Delbrueck Medal in 2013. He developed methods to identify stem cells, and has extensively researched stem cells and progenitor cells.His research focus is "the phylogeny and developmental biology of the cells that make up the blood-forming and immune system." Weissman is widely recognized as the "father of hematopoiesis" since he was the first to purify blood forming stem cells in both mice and humans. His work has contributed to the understanding of how a single hematopoietic stem cell can give rise to specialized blood cells. Weissman is also a leading expert in the field of cancer stem cell biology, where his work sheds light on the understanding of the pathogenesis of multiple human malignancies. He is also known for transgenic research in which human brain cells are grown in the brains of mice.